Sky News Showdown

SUBJECTS: Election timing; recent attacks on Julia Gillard and Tony Abbot; Education reform; Kevin Rudd; the Next Federal Budget

E&OE………………………………………………………………………………….

Michael Kroger: To hear what he’s got to say about this we are joined in Adelaide by the Leader of the Opposition in the House of Representatives, the Member for Sturt, Shadow spokesman for Education, the great man himself Christopher Pyne is in Adelaide, welcome Christopher.

Christopher Pyne: Hello Michael, hello Mark.

Kroger: Thank you very much for your time tonight, Chris.  Well you have heard Mark’s view that the government cannot go to an election next year if they’re not going to deliver a budget surplus.  Your thoughts?

Pyne: Well Wayne Swann and Julia Gillard are a bit like Batman and Robin in one of those old sixties versions of the television show where the walls are closing in around them and they are trying to keep them at bay, because the truth is they are in a race against time to May next year.  They can’t go to the Budget without a surplus.  Julia Gillard already doesn’t have any integrity.  She has no integrity because she said she would never challenge Kevin Rudd, then she challenged him.  She said she wouldn’t introduce a carbon tax and she introduced one, and she said the surplus is basically written in stone and will be delivered.  Now, we know they haven’t got a surplus, everybody knows across Australia that you can’t be getting less income and spending more and somehow end up with more money after that.  Now it would be great if we could run our households like that, if we could earn less money, spend more and still have more money left over at the end.  Nobody believes that to be the case so they’ll have an election in February, March at the latest in order to get out of the way of a budget in May.

Kroger: Do you think that’s feasible?  Aren’t the Australian electorate going to say “You’re holding an election now because you are not going to be able to deliver a budget surplus; you have broken another promise etcetera, etcetera, the kind of thing Mark was talking about.  Is it feasible politically for the government to call an election and have it in March?

Pyne: Well of course that’s what the public will say now the press gallery in Canberra will find some reason to cheer that the government has come up with some clever strategy to have an election in February, March, because they want a contest, but the public, the great Australian public will know that they are avoiding the May budget because if they have the May budget, their lies about the surplus will be exposed.  Now they projected a $22 billion deficit. This year they have delivered a $44 billion deficit. That’s twice as bad as they expected it to be.  Wayne Swann’s never delivered a surplus budget. In fact the last time Labor delivered a surplus budget was in 1990, so nobody believes they’ll deliver a surplus.  They have to get out of the way of that exposing of their great Labor lie about the surplus and that’s why even though they don’t want to, they’ll have an election in February March. That’s why they’re rushing out all these spending promises whether its the National Disability Insurance Scheme, or new, more money for schools, or the submarine project, the blow out of the Nauru and Manus Island extra refugees which costs $1.3 billion a year.  They’re putting all these promises out there to try and change the national conversation so they can have an election.

Mark Latham:  So Chris, what’s the alternative approach?  Are you worried by the political fallout from the large public sector spending cuts in NSW and Qld and in particular in your area of education.  Do you endorse the school funding cuts that have been announced in NSW?

Pyne: Well Mark, nobody likes tightening the belt.  Nobody likes it.  I have four children and a wife and you have children and a wife and Michael has as well, and having to tighten the family budget is never popular.  Nobody wants somebody coming home and saying we haven’t got enough money so we are going to have to cut our spending, we can’t go on the holiday this year or whatever.  Now, Campbell Newman and Barry O’Farrell took over states with massive financial problems.  Queensland alone had a $65 billion debt. Everybody in New South Wales knows that Barry O’Farrell took over an economic basket case, so the public, even though they don’t like cuts, the public also knows it was an absolute political necessity, in Queensland and New South Wales.  Of course I don’t like them but they’re decisions the New South Wales and Queensland governments have made and the Queensland and New South Wales voter will get their chance to decide whether it was the right thing or the wrong thing to do when an election is held in either of those states.

Kroger: Chris it’s very hard for this government quite frankly to have an election in March and say “Look, the Budget is going to be in deficit for the year.”  I mean Wayne Swann has said a thousand times, Julia Gillard has said five thousand times there’s going to be a Budget surplus in the year 2012/2013. I mean we know Swan has delivered four deficits totalling $173 billion or thereabouts, more than $40 billion a year.  To go to an election and not deliver on that promise would be electoral suicide, would it not?  Surely the only thing they can do is make massive spending cuts, massive increases in tax in superannuation and perhaps in property, etcetera, etcetera and try and fathom a surplus and go to an election after May.  To go before May with a deficit would destroy the Government, would it not?

Pyne: Well they have wedged themselves Michael, They’ve wedged themselves as they have done so many times in the last five years. They’ve tried to be clever and they have wedged themselves.  So, what they’ve done is they have attacked the spending cuts in New South Wales and Queensland as the worst thing that’s ever happened since the Battle of Isandlwana and now they’re in this terrible bind if they actually make any cuts to the Budget, people will turn around and say “Hey, you said we could have it all.  You said we could have more spending, we could have income tax cuts, we could have a fabulous quality of standard of Government services increasing every year, no public service cuts, you criticise Campbell Newman and Barry O’Farrell and then you’ve gone and done it all yourselves.”   They’ve got themselves in a terrible bind.  They can’t go to the Budget because they’ll be exposed as the liars they are and if they go to the budget, if they go to an election before the budget, people like yourself and the coalition and Mark will say the only reason you are not going to the Budget is you know that you are going to be exposed for making promises you couldn’t keep and I think the public are thoroughly a wake up to them

Latham: Well let’s have a look at Opposition policy making.  Chris are you worried about the shift in political momentum in recent weeks where I think a number of people are worried that Tony Abbott is very much a one trick pony, that he’s very good on the negative side of politics but the Opposition is not really presenting itself as an alternative government with constructive, positive policies, putting them forward to the Australian people.  You’ve done a lot of good work in schools but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of other policy work being released on the Opposition side.  So do you think we’re getting to the part of the political cycle now where the Opposition needs to be much more positive and position itself as an alternative instead of a negative carping outfit?

Pyne: Well there’s no doubt, Mark, that Tony Abbott has been a very effective Leader of the Opposition and he has highlighted a very bad Government’s failings more successfully than anybody I can remember.  So he’s done that job very well and of course, unfortunately there’s a lot of failings to highlight.  We have got a lot of policy out there but as you would remember from your own period as Leader of the Opposition, the press gallery sort of move from one issue to the other very quickly.  You can announce a policy like bringing back the Australian Building and Construction Commission one day and the media aren’t interested the next day.  We have said we will abolish the carbon tax, we have said we will abolish the mining tax.  We’ve obviously got the most generous maternity leave scheme on the table but this next few months that are coming up will be an opportunity for Tony Abbott to talk more about the kind of government he would lead. In fact today he obviously announced a policy in terms of defence spending where we would be quarantining Defence from cuts and trying to rebuild the defence infrastructure that we had planned for the future because a serious country has a serious defence force.  He will keep outlining those kinds of polices over the coming months but tragically, there is so much for the media to write about that’s a failing of the Government that they are a bit obsessed by that and if they’re not writing about how terrible the Government is they’re writing about Kevin Rudd’s comeback.  So it’s hard to compete with the front page for positive news when there is so much that’s negative about this Government and the latest of course will be this UN Security Council bid.  We spent $40 million on the bid itself.  We spent untold tens of millions of dollars in aid to countries and continents that we hadn’t previously regarded as priorities.  If we win it, it will have cost us a tremendous amount of money and if we lose it will go down in the same league as the failed world cup soccer bid.

Kroger: Christopher, you broke a golden rule of these special editions of Showdown, I have to tell you, mentioned the words “Kevin Rudd” and this is a Kevin Rudd free show.

Pyne:  It’s a Kevin Rudd free zone

Kroger: You will start my colleague right off. You’ll send him right off if you mention Kevin Rudd and when he’s had a go, then he’ll send me off.

Pyne: He permeates every aspect of our life, Kevin.  Even when he’s talking about how he’s not running for leader, he’s talking about himself and how he’s going to take the fight to Tony Abbott and stop him from getting elected.  You’ve got to admire him.  He works himself into every single conversation.

Kroger: I love his interviews where they say to him the polls have turned around, the Government is doing well and you can just see him choking on his words saying he’s delighted as to how well the government is going.

Pyne: My favourite Kevin Rudd interviews are the ones where he interviews himself where he gets asked a question then he asks himself another question so he can interview himself.

Kroger: Well it would be cheaper for SKY to put him on this show, there’d just be one compare, interviewing himself.

Pyne: Exactly.

Kroger: We wouldn’t need people like you. Christopher we’re going to ask you in a few minutes about David Marr and the Tony Abbott you know.  What do you think about him?  You’ve probably see him more than anybody else. But the question of funding.  What is... there’s views out there the Coalition will lop $70 billion of the Budget on an annual basis. Where is that at? What is the truth of those numbers? We can’t seem to get clarity on that, or I can’t.  So what is the current position of the Opposition in relation to this mysterious Budget cut number.  Where is that at?

Pyne: Well there have been several budgets since the Labor Party  started talking about this so called black hole and of course the Financial Review has already highlighted that they have a $120 billion black hole, but putting that aside, it has been several budgets since then.  We will know the numbers upon which we can rely, when an election is called and the Pre-election Financial Forecasts are published - The PEFO as it is called.  We get a better idea from the end of this year from MYEFO - the Mid Year Economic Forecasts - and of course the Budget is the best means of knowing the actual numbers in the budget but we can’t really say exactly what our budget position will look like, our fiscal policy until the election is called until we get the final numbers from Treasury then we can announce in good time before Election Day exactly what we will be doing on a fiscal basis.  But we know we will be abolishing the carbon tax, we know we will be abolishing the mining tax. They’re two things that are already in the vault.

Kroger: Christopher we are going to take a break for a moment and we’ll be back with a special edition of showdown in just a moment.

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Kroger: And welcome back to this special edition of Showdown, I’m here with my colleague former Labor leader Mark Latham, and we’re joined in Adelaide by the opposition spokesman on education, Christopher Pyne, who no doubt read the David Marr article on Tony Abbott. Christopher, what were your thoughts?

Pyne: Well it was actually a much longer piece than it was given due credit for. I mean, I noticed David Marr’s comments this week, where he said that the stories that got most attention were really basically a paragraph in a 33,000 word essay, and when you read the whole essay you get a very different picture of what David Marr was conveying, which was a very determined, energetic, hard working Leader of the Opposition. So as usual, of course, the media focussed on one small aspect of it and made that the whole story. I think David Marr is probably a bit disappointed with the treatment of the piece.

Latham: I would have thought one of the recurring themes in the essay is Tony Abbott as a man of exaggeration…

Pyne: [laughs]

Latham:… If you look at his career at university, at his time as a backbencher in the federal parliament, there’s a whole catalogue in the essay of experiences where Abbott has made a statement one day and had to pull back thirty of forty per cent the next day. In recent times, of course, the exaggerated claims about the impact of the carbon tax are notorious, and just yesterday he was overreaching in his comments about Julia Gillard and meeting with the Indonesian president. So Christopher, isn’t this a major worry, that Abbott has got a long standing pattern of exaggeration and his credibility is really going to come under pressure in coming times as this pattern continues?

Pyne: Well Mark, I think Tony Abbott is a bit like John Howard. I think there’s not much about Tony Abbott that the public doesn’t know already. He’s a great one for putting himself out there in terms of his own background and past, and I think the public have a fair idea of Tony Abbott and what he stands for, and if he was to be elected, if he was fortunate enough to be elected prime minister, they wouldn’t be getting a clean slate about which they knew nothing. I think one of the things about Kevin Rudd that failed him was that the public didn’t really have a full picture of Kevin Rudd until the Labor Party filled it in for us – filled it in by leaking, filled it in by writing stories, filled it in in February by launching a jihad against Kevin Rudd, a political jihad. I think with Tony Abbott, what you see is what you get. I think the public are fully aware of the kind of person Tony Abbott is and judging by the polls they seem to be prepared to elect him as Prime Minister of our great country.

Latham: Is that borne out, though, by the reaction to this essay? Because, whether the punch incident is true or not, There was certainly enormous public focus on it, perhaps enormous public surprise that Abbott had this type of matter in his past, and there is a feeling that if the punch thing is true, maybe there are other things people don’t know about Tony Abbott, so I would have thought the punch incident, the way it was raised in David Marr’s essay and the media reaction to it demonstrates that perhaps people don’t really know the true Tony Abbott, and the fact that he has this pattern of exaggeration makes that even harder for the electorate to come to grips with  what does this man actually stand for, what is the truth about his past, and what are his plans for the country’s future?

Pyne: I think Tony Abbott is not an exaggerator, I think he’s a humble person. I mean, he spent the weekend that he was being smeared by the Labor party about the David Marr column, he spent the Saturday firefighting with the volunteer rural fire service in his local area and the Sunday, he was running a marathon with a blind man, leading him for the first marathon this blind man had finished, but he didn’t want anyone to know that. The truth is that for the Labor Party, the last thing left in the locker is the oily, sticky paint to throw at Tony Abbott. They want to smear him as they tried Campbell Newmann in Queensland. It’s what people try to do when they’ve got nothing to say about policy, nothing to say about the future. They’ve tried the announcement of big policies that are very expensive. Everyone knows they haven’t got the money for them. As much as they’d like them to have the money for them, they know that they don’t have it, and that’s just been confirmed this week by announcing a $44 Billion defecit this year. So Labor’s turning to smear and the dirt unit, and I’m sure they’ll do that right through to election day. I think the Australian public don’t really like that. The Australian public are into giving people a fair go, and they judge people by their policies, and not by the smear campaign their opponents run against them.

Latham: But isn’t one of the problems that the attacks against Abbot are somewhat legitimised by the campaign that was run against the Prime Minister by the Australian newspaper, going back on her history twenty years ago, the trade union dispute and a former boyfriend. Does the Liberal Party now regret the fact that it allowed that campaign to run, saying that the prime minister had questions to answer? That was the Liberal mantra – consistently saying the Prime Minister had questions to answer. It seems to me that was very much an own goal, that Tony Abbott, yourself and others say what the Prime Minister did as a matter of relative trivia twenty years ago is not relevant and if you’d said that at that time you would have protected Abbott from examination of his past and the sort of thing that’s come out in the David Marr essay.

Pyne: The Liberal Party didn’t raise the Australian Workers Union…

Latham: No but you let them run you were very happy day after day for Liberal people to say the Prime  Minister has questions to answer, questions to answer. If you cut it off at that point then I think you would have protected Abbott and would have ended (whether it’s Labor or Liberal) the smear politics in Australia and protected Abbott much more effectively.

Pyne: But I think you have to remember that Robert McClelland raised the issue of the Australian Workers Union in Parliament and that story was being run by the Labor Party for all it was worth. Julia Gillard’s opponents from within the Labor Party Caucus, so the supporters of change in the Labor Party were pushing that around and of course the people that were involved in the case itself in the Australian Workers Union were pushing that around and story was given great credibility by the Slater and Gordon Partners who came out and confirmed that she left Slater and Gordon under a cloud and they of course that they released the transcripts of the interview with Julia Gillard so I don’t think you can blame the Liberal Party for any of that. The response from the Labor Party’s dirt unit was a non-scandal from more than 30 years ago from which there were no witnesses, no documentation, nothing to substantiate it and I think basically it fell rather flat, especially when you read in the Weekend Australian other stories that Barabara Ramjan raised at University against the far-left against what they called the “Spartanistas” or something.

Latham: So you’ve got no regrets about the Liberal Party response to that Gillard matter?

Pyne: We don’t have a response…

Kroger: Hang on a minute, why would they. You’re comparing two things. First of all Abbott’s allegedly punched the wall. That’s his great crime. What’s she done? She’s admitted that she set up a slush fund at Slater and Gordon…

Latham: She didn’t set it up that wrong, that’s factually incorrect. She didn’t set it up.

Kroger: She did set it up. She wrote the rules for it.

Latham: She gave them legal advice. It’s factually incorrect to say that she established it. It’s a mistake that other outlets have made and wrong to say it here…

Kroger: They incorporated it, she set it up, into which…

Latham: No, no, no she…

Kroger: Between $400,000 and $1,000,000 was put into that fund and no one was ever charged. Now why isn’t that a matter of public interest? Why isn’t that a matter of legitimate public interest? $400,000-$1,000,000 has gone into this fund for the AWU and no one was ever charged.

Latham: She’s not responsible for that and whether he was charged or wasn’t charged, take that up with the Western Australia Police, and no one can pretend that the Julia Gillards is responsible for the Western Australian Police or the Victorian Police Force in the 1990s. Take it up with them.

Kroger: Christopher, just one final point is this, about Tony Abbott and we know Abbott extremely well, but in my forty years in the Liberal Party, I have never come across anyone who has fewer enemies than Tony Abbott, its very hard to find anyone who is an enemy of Abbott. I mean John Howard had enemies, Andrew Peacock had enemies, dare I say it Christopher even people as good as you and I have the occasional enemy, very occasionally, not very many…

Pyne: No, no you’re wrong about that, I can’t think of any.

Latham: What about the backbencher, Bernardi?

Pyne: No, I never take anything personally so I don’t have any enemies. Mr Kroger’s got enemies to burn; couldn’t list them.

Kroger: I couldn’t list who any of Abbott’s enemies are and for people who don’t know Tony Abbott that tells you something extraordinary about a bloke who has as many wars as we do, that there’s no one that dislikes Tony Abbott. Compare that to Kevin Rudd, the reason that he’s so popular in the polls is that people haven’t met him yet; as soon as they meet him they take an instant dislike to him.

Latham: He’s got plenty of enemies in this book and one of your old mates Peter Costello was quoted as saying that Abbott used to tell the Cabinet that he learned all his economics at the feet of Bob Santamaria. Costello says “I was horrified”. If they’re his friends who needs enemies. If they’re his Liberal Party friends  - Peter Costello - Tony Abbott doesn’t need enemies.

Pyne: Well Tony Abbott – between you two I can’t even get a word in. Tony Abbott doesn’t have enemies in politics because he’s a healer and he’s a leader and he tries to bring people together and point them in the direction of making Australia a better country and defeating our opponents, rather than fighting amongst themselves. I think one of his great achievements since September, 2009 has been healing the Liberal Party which was strife torn having lost in 2007 then going through Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership, you have to say he has welded together a disparate group of people into a very united and harmonious team.

Kroger: Christopher I want to thank you for being with us tonight. We know you were at a dinner tonight and you’ve broken from that dinner to be with us on showdown and no doubt we’ll see you sometime in the future.

Pyne: It’s a great pleasure.

ENDS